1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computer network application, more particularly, to electronic map search on a computer network.
2. Description of Related Art
World Wide Web (Web) provides people with a great number of practical services. Electronic map is such a map-based Web service. Some search services (such as Google, Baidu and Sogou etc) have integrated with electronic map service, and user may use the electronic map function in these search services to query information of a certain spot and plan travel line, time, etc. In order to efficiently utilize electronic map search, it is required to provide an accurate place name during electronic map search. However, user sometime can not provide an accurate address for a place. For example, in a city, there may be different place names for a same geographic location, i.e., formal place name, common place name, and the place name that had been used but has been abandoned. During the electronic map search, if a place name contained in the query entered by a user does not exist (actually, does not exist in the electronic map), the expected search result may not be obtained immediately.
Providing image in electronic map search service is very useful. For example, if one has never been to a certain spot, the image about that spot (spot image) can provide him with description about that spot. However, with respect to the wide spot space, the number of spot images that can be provided by electronic map search service is still very limited.
To provide more spot images, some map search engines search images on Web (such as images uploaded by network users) through an image search engine, however, since many images do not match spots of electronic map, the map search engine can not utilize images on Web very well. This is due to the search of a current image search engine is one that based on simple keyword matching. The image search engine searches images based on keyword (e.g. place name keyword) in an image query, and if there is an image that matches the keyword (e.g. the surrounding text of the image contains the keyword), then the returned result will contain the target image, otherwise, there is no image in the returned result.
FIG. 1A-1D represents an illustrative procedure of an electronic map search application (“Google search map”) in the art. As shown in FIG. 1A, on the map search page, a user enters a query [], the query result page returned by search system shows “your search for ,  near  did not match any locations”, and it also shows a suggestion of “search the web for ; if the user follows the suggestion and clicks the link “, , ” to search the web, as shown in FIG. 1B, the query result page returned by search system includes a query result . If the user clicks the link , the search system switches from network search to map search and shows a page as shown in FIG. 1C, which includes an introduction to  and provides the function of  (view map)”; if the user clicks , the system returns to the electronic map as shown in FIG. 1D and marks location (1) of  on the electronic map.
FIG. 2A-2C is another example of applying  (Google map search)”. As shown in FIG. 2A, on map search page, a user enters a query [, ], the query result page returned by search system shows ,   and it also shows a suggestion of , ; if the user follows the suggestion and clicks the link , , the search system will return a query result page as shown in FIG. 2B, all the query results contained therein are information keyed on  and there is no information about . Then, the user has to enter a query  on the network search page, the search page returns a first page of query result pages as shown in FIG. 2C, in which a headline of the first item located at the top of that page is a headline about ”, the content below headline  located at the bottom relates to , and below the headline  of the third item at the middle part of that page is the following introduction ”. The user needs to read query result pages (on which there are tens of thousands of query results) so as to make further judgment; if fortunately, the user correctly determines that  should be replaced by  from the introduction of , then the user can enter a query [] on the map search page to perform search.
In the above two examples, whether the query entered by a user is [] or [], all the result pages returned by the search system do not directly include the object to be looked up by the user. The user needs to analyze different situations, switch between a network search page and a map search page, attempt to enter different queries, finally it is possible to obtain the object to be queried by the user.